This work demonstrates the very existence of economic rents in franchising using, for the first time, the franchisees’ actual financial statements. This finding makes franchising more appealing for applicants and supports the hypothesis that rents are efficient devices to motivate franchisees.

Unconditionally, pushed spin-offs are found to survive longer than their pulled counterparts. Using matched employer–employee data and novel multivariate decomposition techniques, we show that pushed spin-offs’ relative survival advantage is mostly explained by their larger human capital...